SynBioBeta Speaker
Huafeng Xu
Atommap
Founder and CEO
Huafeng Xu, Ph. D., is the co-founder and CEO of Atommap, a New York-based biotech company transforming drug discovery through advanced computational methods. Atommap’s proprietary platform harnesses biomolecular dynamics to deliver therapeutic molecules that reprogram protein function. Since its founding in 2023, Atommap has partnered with 11 companies in their discovery projects and has on its own developed first-in-class molecules addressing a challenging oncological target. Huafeng previously served as Chief Technology Officer of Silicon Therapeutics, which Roivant acquired in 2021, then as CTO of Roivant Discovery before launching Atommap with his co-founders. Over his 25-year career as a chemist and computer scientist, he has developed the methods and software for molecular dynamics simulations and free energy calculations that are now widely used in the pharmaceutical industry, and he has pioneered the industrial application of computation-driven drug design. His publications have garnered over 10,000 citations. He earned his Bachelor of Science from Peking University and his M.S. and Ph. D. from Columbia University, and was a visiting postdoctoral scholar in UC San Francisco. In his spare time, Huafeng enjoys wine and solving math problems, sometimes simultaneously.
SynBioBeta 2026 Tickets are Live
Confirmed Speakers
Sessions Featuring
Huafeng
This Year
•
-
Tools & Tech
The Physics of Life: Scaling Biology from Molecules to Cells
Cells are often described as bags of chemistry—but they are better understood as finely tuned physical systems. Within each one, DNA is packed into nanoscopic volumes, enzymes race at turnover rates rivaling jet engines, and molecular collisions happen billions of times per second. This session explores the cell as a physical object—its limits of size, speed, and efficiency. How fast can information move from genome to protein? How does diffusion constrain cell size and shape? How do energy flows through metabolism define what life can and cannot do? By examining the physics that underpins biology, this session challenges us to see cells not as mysterious black boxes, but as programmable systems operating under universal rules. This perspective may hold the key to engineering biology with the same rigor as physics and computer science.
Purchase Pass
•
-
Tools & Tech
The Physics of Life: Scaling Biology from Molecules to Cells
Cells are often described as bags of chemistry—but they are better understood as finely tuned physical systems. Within each one, DNA is packed into nanoscopic volumes, enzymes race at turnover rates rivaling jet engines, and molecular collisions happen billions of times per second. This session explores the cell as a physical object—its limits of size, speed, and efficiency. How fast can information move from genome to protein? How does diffusion constrain cell size and shape? How do energy flows through metabolism define what life can and cannot do? By examining the physics that underpins biology, this session challenges us to see cells not as mysterious black boxes, but as programmable systems operating under universal rules. This perspective may hold the key to engineering biology with the same rigor as physics and computer science.
Purchase Pass
Session lineup still growing
Purchase Pass
Featuring
Speaker Coming Soon
•
-
Human Health
From Cells to Patients: Solving the Scale Mismatch in Virtual Biology
Drug discovery often measures biology at the cell level while interventions work at the tissue, organ, or whole-patient scale. This mismatch can make accurate cell-level predictions irrelevant in the clinic. This session dives into strategies to bridge that gap: multiscale modeling that nests single-cell dynamics within organ-level simulations, spatial transcriptomics that preserve context, and surrogate models that translate cell-level outputs into clinical biomarkers. Speakers will ask: how do we ensure virtual biology reflects not just what cells do in isolation, but how biology behaves in the real complexity of patients?
Purchase Pass
Featuring
Speaker Coming Soon
